Pulse’s new ‘Highlights’ feature makes sense of all that social news sharing

The digital news magazine app Pulse has always been good at making sense of the many information sources available online, but now it wants to cull the insanity of your social circle to find only the most popular articles and links.

Today the service is rolling out a new feature called Pulse Highlights that you use to create a tab of news based on what’s popular among those in your social circle. Basically, any news story that your friends have shared or saved excessively will pop up within the new Highlights tab, which you can access from the “save stories” tab in the left sidebar.

The new feature is basically an iteration of what the old version of Digg (pre-Betaworks) attempted (and failed) to do. You can also think of Pulse Highlight as a curator similar to Facebook, only showing you the news stories and shared links from within a feed based on your reading habits and interactions with the social network. However, Pulse may be able to put a fresh spin on things since its focused entirely on news stories rather than all social interactions.

“Is a story’s worth based on number of shares? We believe in quality over quantity: We don’t think an article needs 500-plus ‘likes’ to make it interesting, inspiring, or share-worthy,” said Pulse founder Akshay Kothari about the new feature. “Highlights is based on your personal network, so if a close friend or family member cares about a story, you’ll see it in your feed.”

Stories that appear in the Highlights tab show who initially shared the posts, and you can track conversations about them via push notifications. You can also add posts to the Highlights tab or share to your social networks.

The new features is available today via Android devices and should roll out to iOS devices in the near future.